The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  In the lobby of the high-rise, there were wheelchairs against the wall and a small line of old people were waiting to have their blood pressure checked by a lady in pink scrubs, who was making them laugh. Once Mrs. Browning buzzed me up, I took the elevator to the sixth floor and got off feeling a little uneasy and wishing we’d decided to meet at Panera again. The hallway was dark and smelled kind of funny, like ramen noodles. I suddenly felt dread in my stomach, like maybe it was a bad idea to come here, especially if she wanted to dissect my novel again.

  I had handed out the first two chapters to the group on Tuesday night, and everyone said that they loved them, and what a great job I’d done for someone so young, and I thought I could really trust them since they’re so old. Old people usually have opinions worth listening to, unlike people my age who like to waste a whole English class—after reading A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen—debating the possible influences on modern women’s roles in society. I mean, that question could’ve been a topic for some graduate student’s thesis; it shouldn’t have been posed as a free-for-all to a bunch of kids, who say random things like, “Oh! Oh! I know a girl whose mom left on the back of a motorcycle for two years, but then she came back.” And then Mrs. Kindling acts like this information is really useful to the discussion, when really she’s just thrilled somebody raised her hand. Participation is actually a portion of our grade, even if the only thing you have to say is totally stupid. Sometimes I think, If I had enough information about this topic I would destroy you, but since I know nothing, I won’t say a word. But it’s different when people are old. I actually want to hear what they have to say.

  Except that on Tuesday night at the library, they couldn’t come up with anything bad about the pages I’d turned in. Jean Fester actually said she thought it was “surprisingly sweet,” which didn’t give me a lot to work with. That’s when Mrs. Browning kind of snorted and said, “I’m sorry—a woman gives birth to four different children by four different men and abandons them in four different countries, and you’re calling it sweet?” Selena Markmann spoke up then: she said she thought it was handled very whimsically, that the author clearly wasn’t worrying about the psychology of being left behind.

  I didn’t want to side with Jean and Selena, who seemed to be ganging up on Mrs. Browning, so I said sort of quietly, “I just liked the idea of being found.”

  “I would like to reiterate my point,” Mrs. Browning said, which was that Larissa, the mother in the story, needs to have a passion that makes her run away. It had been two weeks, and I still couldn’t come up with anything.

  After I tapped lightly on the door to Mrs. Browning’s apartment and waited, I heard keys jangling down the dimly lit hallway and then polyester parachute pants swishing toward me. “Elyse? Is that you?” came an astonished voice. I turned to see Selena Markmann, the one in the group with the blue-black hair, who was wearing a purple tracksuit. I smiled and waved hello, even though her eyebrows were scaring me a little since she’d drawn them on like black McDonald’s arches. “What are you doing here?” she asked, but before I could answer, I heard the latch on Mrs. Browning’s door, and we both watched it open.

  As soon as Mrs. Browning saw who was standing next to me, her smile darkened. “Selena,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  “Mary,” Mrs. Markmann replied, looking like a detective who’d just cracked the case. “I was just asking Elyse what on earth she could possibly be doing inside this apartment building on such a beautiful Saturday afternoon.”

  Mrs. Browning yanked on my arm and said, “She’s helping me move some furniture.” Then she pulled me inside, slammed the door, and sighed. “I don’t mean to shock you, my dear,” she said, “but that woman drives me crazy.” I said I wasn’t shocked, but maybe she could’ve come up with something better than “moving some furniture,” which made both of us laugh. And just like that, I wasn’t uneasy anymore.

  Her apartment smelled normal, meaning it didn’t smell like much of anything at all. It was so small that the kitchen and living room were actually one room with two different floors, linoleum switching over to carpet. Everything on the rug was squished together in a half circle: a love seat touched an end table which touched an easy chair which touched another table which touched a rocker which touched bookshelves and another end table. There were clocks on basically every surface that didn’t already have a book on it. While Mrs. Browning put a kettle on for tea, I browsed around her shelves for a little while. Most of the books I’d never heard of, except for Franny and Zooey and All of a Kind Family.

  Next to one of the clocks there was a black-and-white picture of a tall man in a dark suit who had a full, broad smile, like somebody caught him in the middle of the greatest joke. It was sort of hard not to smile back, which was weird, like he was watching me discover Mrs. Browning or had even been waiting for me to arrive. There was another color picture on the wall of a shaggy-haired guy and a pretty blond woman leaning against a VW bus. In her arms was the cutest, chubbiest baby.

  “Is this you?” I asked, pointing to the pretty blond woman.

  “Actually, no, that’s my daughter-in-law, Carrie, with my son, Dave, and my grandson, Tyler. The other picture is of Thomas, my husband,” said Mrs. Browning.

  “Hey! Who is this?” I picked up a black-and-white photo of three young women standing beside a small airplane on a dusty-looking strip of land. They were wearing leather bomber jackets, baggy pants, boots, and, resting on the top of their helmets, goggles. When I glanced back at Mrs. Browning, she seemed to be holding her breath.

  “That’s me,” Mrs. Browning finally said with a noisy exhale. “With Grace Davinport, my best friend from flight school during World War II, and Murphee Sutherland, another pilot. Grace is the tall one, on the right. We were fly girls.”

  I studied the picture for a few more minutes, trying to pick out white-haired, glasses-sporting Mrs. Browning in the smooth-skinned teenager squinting into the sunlight, with her dark hair blowing in the wind. It wasn’t hard to figure out that she was the short one in the middle. I finally found her in the smile, a version of the one she owned now, except in the picture, her whole face was radiating joy. Grandma says she likes to imagine that when you die, you get turned back into your best self, and if I were Mrs. Browning, this is the one I’d choose. When I finally looked up, Mrs. Browning was standing in the kitchen studying me studying her.

  “Murphee was a Chicago girl with orange hair, straight out of the bottle. Grace was from Iowa, so her worldview consisted of endless prairie and fields of corn and open sky, whereas almost all I’d ever known were steep hills and plunging valleys, winding rivers and at the heart of it all, the steel mills, turning everything overhead black.”

  “Wow.” I snapped my fingers. “That sounds good. I should write that down.”

  Mrs. Browning smiled and handed me a tiny tape recorder off the end table. “Actually, I already started.” My face must’ve gone screwy, since she added, “It’s my husband’s old Dictaphone for dictating chart notes. I was looking at some old pictures the other day and discovered this at the bottom of the box. So, I found some old tapes and started . . . remembering. You can listen later. But in the meantime . . .”

  The kettle started to whistle, and we moved back into the kitchen, where the table seemed set for a special occasion: there was an embroidered tablecloth, a vase of dried flowers, a plate of lemon-ginger cookies, a china tea set covered in painted pink roses, and the real shocker of all: a sleek, white Apple laptop.

  “Hey, where did that—whose computer is that?” I asked.

  “I figured we’d need it for our project,” Mrs. Browning said, looking a little sly. “Go ahead. It’s yours to use,” she added.

  I ran my fingers across the lid of the MacBook, like it was the side of a Porsche. “Do you know how to use a computer?” I asked without thinking.

  “Well, it’s a Mac,” she said, pouring me a cup of tea. “It just works.”

  “So . . .”
I said, sliding a cookie off the plate. “Who were the fly girls?”

  Mrs. Browning explained that while the men were busy flying planes abroad, dropping bombs on Germany and Japan, the women were needed to, as Mrs. Browning put it, “Protect the Zone of Interior.” So she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of civilian flyers trained by the military.

  “Wait a second—my social studies teacher was talking about this during ‘Current Events’! Aren’t you getting some award from the president?”

  She nodded and smiled. “The Congressional Gold Medal. There’s going to be a ceremony in Washington, D.C., next March. It’s going to be quite an affair.”

  “Wow! Who’s going to be there?” I asked.

  “Heavens, I don’t even know. It’ll be a surprise to see who’s still alive.” She laughed lightly. “Dave and Carrie will fly in from Seattle, and Tyler and his wife and daughters will come all the way from California. So if nothing else, when the president shakes my hand, my family will be there to see it. Come, I have something else I’d like to show you.”

  We got up from the table, and I followed her into the little bedroom off the kitchen. “Now where is that thing . . .” she said, opening the door to her closet and rifling through the clothes.

  I was kind of cringing since her hands were shaking so much with each swipe of the hanger. Finally, she found what she was looking for: her old leather bomber jacket. When Mrs. Browning touched it, she got a funny look on her face, too, like the jacket contained the greatest secrets of all.

  “Who’s the blond cartoon character?” I asked, pointing to the patch sewn onto the shoulder—of a little gremlin girl with blue wings and big, red boots.

  “Fifinella, the patron saint of the fly girls. And she’s not blond, my dear; that’s her golden helmet. Go ahead, try it on,” she added, holding out the jacket.

  I hesitated for just a second and then allowed her to slip it over my shoulders. I pushed my arms into the sleeves. The jacket fit perfectly.

  “Look at you,” Mrs. Browning said, watching me settle into the jacket. “A real Women Airforce Service Pilot. It was always too big for me.”

  “Larissa should fly,” I said, and Mrs. Browning laughed. I could just imagine that same thrilled burble coming out of her, back in the days of this picture.

  “It would certainly give your main character a reason to leave her family behind. She wants to be pilot, not a mother.”

  But then I realized something. “The thing is . . . if Larissa’s a fly girl, then I’d have to set the whole book in the United States instead of London.”

  “Oh, well, that won’t work—you’ve probably never even been to the United States,” Mrs. Browning said. And that made us both laugh.

  “HOW’D IT GO, KIDDO?” DADDY ASKED, WHEN HE PICKED ME UP outside the library at four o’clock. I almost told him what I’d really been researching, but he seemed preoccupied, like the only right answer was “Great!” and silence. He and Mom were going out to dinner, which meant that I was babysitting my brothers, which I do almost every weekend. After we ate leftover Chinese food, I read to Huggie for a while and let him fall asleep in his Batman pajamas, even though Mom said he’d worn them all day and had to change into something else. Then I made sure Toby was in his room fooling around on his desktop, before I watched Be My Next Wife. I was glad to watch the show without Mom, because she always feels bad for Thea’s dad, who has to watch his older daughter as a contestant “fool around with a sex offender on national TV.” And, “They’ve given a rapist his own show!” she always says. Then Daddy reminds Mom that the football star wasn’t even convicted, but Mom always says that doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty. The way Mom talks, you’d think Dr. Palmer had lost Stacey to drugs and prostitution instead of reality TV.

  Afterward, I went back upstairs and checked on Huggie, who’d kicked off all his covers in his sleep. I covered him back up before going across the hall to Toby’s room. “Stop surfing and go to bed,” I said, nodding at the computer screen.

  “I’m programming,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. “Seriously. It’s my homework.” If the FBI were to show up and accuse Toby of hacking the president’s email, it would shock everybody but me.

  After closing his door again, I snuck across the hall into Mom’s nook, which is this little office attached to her bedroom that has windows overlooking the backyard. The builder meant for it to be a walk-in closet, but Mom made it into her private little space, with a desk, a swivel chair, a chaise longue, and a wall of bookshelves. Mom likes to call it her Room of One’s Own, as in, Get the hell out of my Room of One’s Own.

  It was dusk and outside the pool was still, and the sky was turning from purple into night. I craned my neck to the far right to see if Holden was doing his homework or talking on his phone, but unfortunately the Regal Estate McMansions are too far apart for me to catch a glimpse of him doing more than parking his green MINI Cooper in the driveway.

  Then I snooped around Mom’s bookshelves for a bit, trying to find Grandma’s novel. Mrs. Browning was right—a book written by a member of the family should be required reading—but there was only Mom’s fancy collection instead, the leather-bound classics with gold lettering on the binding, most of which she hadn’t actually read. When I didn’t see The Secrets of Flight wedged in her “used” book section—mostly law school texts and some paperback mysteries—I sat down and fished the old-fashioned Dictaphone from my pocket instead. After inserting one of the tiny tapes, I leaned back in Mom’s swivel chair, put my feet up on her desk, and closed my eyes—until Mrs. Browning’s voice crackled through the air, and I remembered I better get typing.

  Half an hour later, I was fighting to stay on the home row while six-year-old Mary and her sister Sarah climbed an apple tree, when I heard the jangle of keys in the foyer and the beeping of the security system. Quickly, I turned off the Dictaphone, switched off the computer, and lunged for the light. The study went dark, except for the glow of Mom’s bedside lamp from the other room.

  Moments later, they were on the stairs. I heard Mom saying, “Lights out,” to Toby, and then Daddy coming into the bedroom and heading straight for the bathroom, followed by Mom’s footsteps a moment later. I should’ve surprised them then—Mom would yell at me for invading her private office and threaten to ground me—but something made me pull my feet up off the floor and hug my knees. Thanks to the strategic location of the trench coat hanging on one of the French doors of the office, they couldn’t see me, but if I tilted my head a little to the side, I could see Mom slipping off her blazer and tossing it over the back of the chair. I hoped they weren’t going to start making out or having sex with each other, but it didn’t seem like that was about to happen, because they weren’t saying anything remotely sexy. They kept analyzing the meal, how the halibut was “disappointing” and “gummy” and the butternut squash ravioli was missing “something vital—like more garlic or even a little cayenne to give it some life.” It was the most boring conversation I’d ever heard and they hadn’t even started analyzing the wine yet.

  My parents are scathing when it comes to food. They are the exact opposite of my grandma Margot, who loves to make a show out of calling the chef out from the kitchen, just so she can say, “This is the best steak I’ve ever had!” which always embarrasses my mom. “You’ve said that about the last two steaks you’ve had, Mother,” Mom always says, wincing.

  Tonight, when I was in the fetal position in my mother’s chair, I was hoping they wouldn’t find me but this little part of me was kind of wishing they’d think to search—I mean did they really think I was already asleep by eleven? But Mom was asking Daddy why he hadn’t finished his lamb, and Daddy was saying he had a big lunch, and just as I let go of my legs to give myself up, I heard Daddy say, “You’ll never guess who I saw today. Remember Natalia?”

  I hadn’t forgotten Natalia—the “woman who was almost my mother,” according to Aunt Andie—so I was sure Mom hadn’t, either.

&
nbsp; “Natalia?” Mom sounded puzzled. “From when we met?”

  And Daddy came out of the bathroom and said that she’s a widow now that her husband died of pancreatic cancer. Mom said, “That’s tragic,” and Daddy said, “I think you mean ironic.”

  “So, where did you run into Natalia?” Mom asked, unbuttoning her blouse. “Wasn’t she in L.A. for a while, selling Viagra or something?”

  “Well . . . that’s the funny part.” Daddy gave a heh-heh kind of laugh and swung his arms. “She’s still out in L.A. but she came to town for a Pfizer conference and wanted to get together. She found me on Facebook. We’ve exchanged some emails.”

  My mom stood there in her full-length slip staring at Daddy. Then she asked, “When were you planning on telling me this?” the same line she always gives me when I make her sign a permission slip for a field trip to Boston that’s going to cost five hundred dollars and I was supposed to have raised the money myself selling candy bars, but I forgot.

  “Right now!” Daddy said, sounding a lot like me.

  Mom wanted to know what exactly this woman wanted, and Daddy said, “To see me again,” and Mom’s voice got so low that to hear her I had to lean forward in my seat, almost exposing my head around the trench coat. I could see Daddy sitting on the bed in his boxers and undershirt, and I could see Mom facing him and I heard her ask him in a quiet voice what exactly he wanted from her, and Dad said, “To see her again.”

  I wasn’t sure what was more awful about this moment: that Daddy wanted to see his old girlfriend or that I was trapped, eavesdropping. My heart was running so fast, it was hard to breathe.

  “I see,” Mom said, nodding vigorously. Then she asked if there were plans for other cross-country lunch dates? “Because—just for the record—I have a real problem with that.”